Surface Pro for Australia in “coming months”

blog The availability of Microsoft’s new Surface tablets in Australia is rapidly reaching the stage of a farce. Just one month ago Redmond launched the supposedly flagship device in the US and in Canada, but made no mention of launches in other first-world, early technology adopter countries such as Australia. Just one month later, overnight last night in the US, the company said Australia and a number of other countries would receive the Surface Pro “in the coming months”, but without giving a firm date. The company’s statement:

Microsoft Corp. today announced that beginning late March the rollout of Surface will continue, bringing Surface RT with Windows RT to Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan and Surface Pro with Windows 8 Pro to Australia, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, New Zealand and the United Kingdom in the coming months.

“We are eager to see people and businesses in more countries get a chance to experience this new category of devices,” said Panos Panay, corporate vice president, Microsoft Surface. “Surface is the best of a tablet and a PC.”

And meanwhile, Microsoft Australia still hasn’t been able to deliver review units of the Surface RT, which launched in Australia months ago, fuelling the impression that the company just doesn’t have that many units of the Surface RT at all locally. What the hell is going on, Microsoft? When is Australia going to get any certainty around Surface supply? After all, Windows 8 isn’t going to sell itself — apparently it needs all the help it can get.

9 Comments

The problem I see is that Microsoft is latecomer to the tablet space and it’s questionable whether there’s a need for another competitor in that space.

So, the real question is whether Microsoft will accept that the (eventual) failure of the Surface to gain any real traction in the (flooded) tablet market is their own fault or whether they’ll blame consumers for insignificant take up rates.

More choice is always great for consumers but we’re quick to move on when supply cannot meet demand. Especially when there are plenty of excellent, already proven alternatives available.

this is v1 of the product and it is a very good product already. it will only get better with time…

and i wouldn’t call microsoft a latecomer. i remember the compaq tc1000 tablet (still the best form factor IMO). that was 10 years ago… windows tablets have been around for a long time. the hardware is only starting to catch up….

I’m not forming my opinion based on the quality of the product itself or the companies previous experience with a product. I have no doubts that it would not have even gone to market if it wasn’t up to the minimum expected standards that Microsoft have these days. They’re not the same company as they were 5+ years ago.

I have formed my opinion on the fact that, for them to even scratch the surface (no pun intended) of the tablet market as it is today (and not 10 years ago) that they’ve got a long way to go even if they get everything right. Their competitors have had a massive head start and are very well established.

Microsft tablets do not have the market penetration that iOS or Android based devices have. Their app store platform is hardly mature and the quality of apps just isn’t up to the same standard when compared to those found in competitors offerings.

However, none of this matters if they cannot resolve the supply issues.

I’m not against there being another competitor because I cannot ignore the benefits to consumers when there is (healthy) competition. All I’m saying is I don’t think Microsoft is quite there yet to be able to provide that competition to the existing products in todays marketplace.

Microsoft big advantage is the enterprise space. Tighter integration with their server stack and the ability run windows native apps on the surface pro, while one of their major competitors only offer grudging support to enterprise deployment(glares at Apple). It is one of the reasons blackberry still exist in the phone space and in the tablet area Microsoft well positioned in the enterprise market.

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